Manufacturing software for small business: every step in its place

Say you sell a gift box with four items in it. Then an order for 60 boxes comes in, and suddenly people are asking whether there is enough ribbon left, who already folded the cartons and whether anyone wrote down the lot number of the soap. The answers are on a note at the workbench, in the head of whoever worked the morning shift, and in a spreadsheet nobody has touched since March. And since the soap was never booked out, the shop still lists bars that are already packed into boxes.

What does a production order look like in Omneya?

Here is the route from production set to finished product, in six steps.

1. Create the production set. This is your bill of materials: the end product, its components and the quantity of each per unit. On the set you decide whether a lot number and an expiry date have to be recorded.
2. Create the order. Pick the set and the quantity. Orders can also come from sales orders, when the item sold is linked to a set.
3. Print the paperwork. The pick list and the work instructions come as PDFs, both with a QR code, so the order is back on screen in seconds at the workbench.
4. Pick the materials. At the picking step your team scans a barcode, item number or storage location.
5. Work and check. Steps are ticked off one after another. A quality check only closes as passed or failed.
6. Complete. Enter the quantity produced, with the lot number and expiry date of the finished product if needed. The finished product goes into stock.

Routines you repeat often can be saved as a template for the work steps. There are five kinds of step: besides picking and quality checks, there are notes, work instructions and pick lists.

On the order page a bar shows how many steps are done, two out of four, for example, and below it which components have already been booked. When someone asks how far along Friday’s boxes are, you can answer without walking round the workshop.

When do materials leave the warehouse?

A single setting decides this, the consumption strategy. It applies to all orders.

With reservation, starting an order moves no stock. Materials are booked on completion, together with the finished product coming in. You can make one exception yourself: a picking step can be set to book as soon as it is ticked off.

With transfer, components move into a separate production warehouse when the order starts. They are gone from your sales stock straight away, which is more honest for long orders, because the shop stops offering them.

Which one fits depends on how long your orders run. If you finish in a morning, reservation works well.

Spotting shortages before they hurt

The production dashboard totals the material needed for every open and running order and compares it with the stock available. Wherever more is needed than you have, the component shows up in the bottlenecks box, with the biggest shortfall at the top. The count covers all warehouses together, so you see that ribbon is short and by how much, but not in which warehouse.

Production order software pays off sooner than most people expect. Once a bill of materials has more than three parts and more than one person works on it, you save yourself a lot of questions.

Where the limits are

Omneya does not schedule machines, workstations or shifts, and there is no run that creates production orders on its own from minimum stock levels. Bills of materials have one level. You enter the lot number and expiry date of the finished product yourself on completion; they are not carried over from the components. Cost calculation per order is not built in. If you run machine-based production you need a dedicated system, but for a workshop with ten people at the bench the scope is usually enough.

Try it in a test system with a set of three or four components and a small order, then look at stock to see what was booked. Every feature is listed on the production module page, and the inventory behind it under inventory and stocktaking. If the term ERP is still a bit vague, start with What is an ERP system?. Plans are on the pricing page.